Monday, February 17, 2003

Shutting out dissent

By PV Vivekanand
Shutting out voices which raise substantiated questions about the truth/lies in the Bush administration's contentions about Iraq seems to be an integral part of Washington spin doctors. The latest to suffer from what is widely perceived as a dedicated campaign to deny critics any forum was a website which has been critical of the administration's policies and allowed a former Iraqi scientist to point out the hollowness of US Secretary of State Colin Powell's contention that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons.
A website which was taken off the Internet after it carried a strong refuttal of charges made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell against Iraq early this month is back in business. While the company which hosted the site cited technical reasons for the shut-down, those who maintained the site argues that the move reflected Washington's anxiety to shut out any dissenting voice against its plans to wage war on that country.
The website, yellowtimes.org, was advised by its hosting company that the site was being shut on Feb.10, less than three days after it carried an article by Imad Khadduri, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, countering Powell's allegations against Iraq made in a Feb.5 speech at the UN.
The operators of the website has found a new server and host and is now accessible under the same address, according to Firas Al Atraqchi, who is a regular columnist on the website.
Atraqchi says that "the campaign to stifle dissent and censor any questioning of current US policies vis a vis the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular, has reached new levels."
He asserted that websites which host alternative views, and/or views that contradict US foreign policy are no longer tolerated on the Internet and are systematically coming under hacker attack and political pressures to "relocate."
The hosting company claimed that "we were using up too many CPU resources and therefore slowing down their other sites," said Atraqchi. "By CPU resources, I do not mean hard drive
space or bandwidth. We did not exceed what we were paying for (over $100 a month). Yet we were told that they simply no longer had the technical requirements to run our site as is."
He adds that the site had been under "constant malicious attack from people (and groups) regarding our content -- e-mail attacks, defamation, hacking into our website, and possibly denial of service attacks."
Imad Khadduri's articles on the Iraqi nuclear science programme only heightened such activities, says Atraqchi.
The YellowTimes.org website, according to Atraqchi, drew fire because it published views that "directly question, criticise, and berate the US official line regarding the impending invasion of Iraq."
Khadduri, who is now based in Canada, wrote under the title "the nuclear bomb hoax" that the "evidence" that Powell said the US had against Iraq was at best flimsy.
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, in his Feb.14 report to the UN Security Council, has also raised questions about Powell's assertions.
The charges Powell made in his speech reveal the US administration's "untenable attempt to cover with a fig leaf their thread bare arguments and misinformation campaign" against Iraq, wrote Khadduri, who cited a series of questions based on the realities on the ground in Iraq. These realities, he said, quashed Powell's allegations.
Khadduri, who has a MSc in Physics from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Nuclear Reactor Technology from the University of Birmingham, wrote that Powell had a wrong translation of a declaration that Iraqi scientists were asked to sign with a condition that they faced execution if they did not abide by it. The declaration, according to Powell, bound the signatory not to reveal secrets to the International Automic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams.
"Exactly the opposite is true," said Khadduri, who worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. "The four or five, as I recall such declarations, which I read in detail, held us to the penalty of death in the event that we did not hand in all of the sensitive documents and reports that may still be in our possession."
"Had Powell's intelligence services provided him with a copy of these declarations, and not depended on testimonies of "defectors" who are solely motivated by their self-promotion in the eyes of their "beholders," and availed himself to a good Arabic translation of what these declarations actually said, he would not, had he in any sense been abiding by the truth, mentioned this as "evidence." 
According to Khadduri, "the cache of documents" seized from the house of scientist Faleh Hamza and cited by Powell as evidence that Iraq is hiding or is still working on its "third" uranium enrichment process was actually reported to the UN inspectors in 1997.
The documents contained the summary of a failed project that dated back to 1988 and that the disclosure of the programme had been acknowledged by Mohammed Al Baradei, the head of the IAEA, according to Khadduri, who was able to leave Iraq in late 1998 with his family. and now teaches and works as a network administrator in Toronto, Canada
"The 3,000 pages of documents were financial statements and Faleh's own lifetime research work, and had nothing to do with the nuclear weapon programme," wrote Khadduri. "That is why he kept them at his home."
"Powell only accused but did not provide any evidence that Iraq had tried to get nuclear grade fissile material since 1998," according to Khadduri. "He vainly gave the impression that everything was set and readily waiting for just this material to be acquired and the atomic bomb would be rolling out the other door."
Khadduri has also charged Khidhir Hamza, a former Iraqi scientist with whom Khadduri worked, with fabricating and exaggerating his importance in Iraq's nuclear program outlined in Hamza's book "Saddam's Bombmaker."
Khadduri wrote that Powell should have sought answers to some key questions in order to find the truth behind his charges. These included:
"Where is the scientific and engineering staff required for such an enormous effort when almost all of them have been living in abject poverty for the past decade, striving to simply feed their families on $20 a month, their knowledge and expertise rusted and atrophied under heavy psychological pressures and dreading their retirement pension salary of $2 a month? 
"Where is the management that might lead such an enterprise? The previous management team of the nuclear weapon programme in the eighties exists only in memories and reports. Its members have retired, secluded themselves, or turned to fending for their livelihood of their families. 
"Where are the buildings and infrastructure to support such a programme? The entire nuclear weapon programme of the 80s has been either bombed by the Americans during the war or uncovered by the IAEA inspectors. It is impossible to hide such buildings and structures. Powell should only take a look at North Korea's atomic weapon facilities, or perhaps even Israel's, to realise the impossibility of hiding such structures with the IAEA inspectors scouring everything in sight."
"Powell need only ask those on the ground, the IAEA inspectors delegated by the UN upon America's request, to receive negative answers to all of the questions above," according to Khadduri. "Instead, he chose to fabricate an untruth."